The formulation for Ellie’s turn toward darkness can be traced back to the year 2000. With Ellie pinned by her accomplices, Abby ends Joel’s life with a golf club. Druckmann says Joel’s death needed to be “gross, unceremonious and humiliating.” Enter Abby, a vengeful daughter of a man murdered by Joel during his hospital rampage. The game’s writers trigger Ellie’s evolution in Part II with Joel’s death. Gross and Druckmann went back and forth on a lot of these flashbacks, trying to hit the right notes to convey the “evolution in relationships,” and to make sure they felt “incredibly authentic.” They needed to make it resonate when Joel dies, for both players and Ellie. In one such episode, when the two find rotting corpses of two kids killed by infected, Ellie mutters, “Too bad they weren’t immune." Joel’s lie has severed trust between them, as shown through flashbacks. Even as she and Joel find fragile peace from the infected in fortresslike Jackson, Wyoming, their relationship frays. “And at the beginning of this game, Ellie’s already grappling with that.” “We, as the audience, knew that Joel was not telling Ellie the full truth and lost that relationship,” says Ashley Johnson, the actress who plays Ellie in both Part I and Part II. Her final line is deliberately ambiguous: “Okay.” After Joel rescues her from the hospital, killing those that stood in his way, Ellie confronts him about what happened. Given her immunity, Ellie originally held out hope the world could be restored, that humanity could be saved through a cure, and she was the key to unlocking that reality. By saving her, Joel strips Ellie of what she sees as her purpose: to save humanity from the virus. It’s also the source of Ellie’s emotional turmoil in Part II. Their closeness provides the emotional grounding for Joel’s ultimate decision in Part I to storm the hospital and rescue Ellie before the doctors can use her (and her immunity to the virus) to find a cure. When he comes to her rescue, he pulls her back from David’s body, rocks her in his arms and calls her “baby girl” - a nickname he called his late daughter. The event also solidifies Ellie’s relationship with Joel. “And if every bit she experienced takes her on this spectrum, that was a big jump because of how horrible that was." “With David, it was definitely traumatic,” Druckmann says. It’s a terrifying wake-up call, one that shows Ellie how she can be manipulated. ![]() When she drops her guard, he traps her in a cell until she escapes and kills him. A man named David, insinuated to be a cannibal and pedophile, at first protects her from an attack of infected. Tess, Joel’s early traveling companion, dies at the very start of a journey that also includes the deaths of a 13-year-old boy, Sam, and his older brother Henry, who commits suicide shortly after Sam is killed by infected.įor Ellie, trauma also comes in the form of betrayal. She loses her best friend Riley, before she meets Joel. While the sequel is centered on Ellie, the story puts several characters in her close orbit, each present at different, pivotal junctures in a painful metamorphosis.Įarly concept art of Ellie from “The Last of Us” ()Īs Druckmann says, it’s a “world that normalizes death and violence,” and Ellie experiences loss and trauma time and again. The game is not so much a tale about finding happiness as easing pain, and weighing the cost of that quest. ![]() The death of Joel, her guardian and traveling partner from the first game, has set Ellie’s moral compass spinning as she struggles to find purpose. “The Last of Us Part II” chronicles Ellie’s descent from innocence to match the darkness of the post-apocalyptic hellscape around her. Her optimism is dimmed, her humor muted - her pun book, once filled with jokes, has been replaced by a journal. Driven by revenge, the girl we knew from “The Last of Us” has morphed into something more sinister. The murderer, standing amid their bodies, is not the little girl you remember.įive years after the events of the first game, Ellie is cold, brutal and often merciless. Now they’re dead because a woman needed information. A pregnant woman falls, fatally stabbed in her neck. ![]() Note: This article contains major spoilers for “The Last of Us Part II” and 2013′s “The Last of Us.”Ī man is shot in the chest and chokes on his own blood. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience. Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript.
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